The bottom, after 27 years in a Bay Area backyard, is almost completely rotted from tank to tank, transom to bulkhead; and the fore-and-aft stringers are bent and warped where the boat rested on the trailer's curved lateral saddle. While there are other problems (the tanks must be sanded down and re-skinned with another veneer layer, and the foredeck is questionable) the rotted bottom is the big challenge. The rest of the hull (outboard of the bottom of the tanks) looks like 4 years old rather than 44, and the trunk structure, bulkheads and tanks appear solid, but the rainwater sitting inside the hull was the villain.
I'm open to any and all suggestions or advice, and any recommendations for procedures. Somehow we need to restore both shape and structural strength, and if possible to do it with wood, at least on the inside where it's visible. (If necessary, we might have to have a white bottom below the waterline to hide the fact that some of the outside skin there was pumped from under the ground, or melted and spun from it, rather than grown on top of it.)
We also are beggng for any information possible (dimensions, descriptions, photos, drawings etc.) on the original Fairey Marine cockpit layout--especially thwart dimensions and locations, hardware placement and type, etc. And if anyone out there restoring or maintaining a "woodie" has any of the original-type hardware that is being replaced, I promise it a good home in familiar wooden surroundings; don't throw it away! Our restoration budget is nonexistent at present, but we might scrape together a few clams for some of the real stuff. I think we have the original boom, as well as the original wood boom and centerboard from #861, though the mast was pulverized in the rollover on the Berkeley Flats. We do have a Proctor C extrusion, which I think could be contemporary (can any other oldtimers confirm when the C was introduced?) but need rigging locations used by the original Faireys.
The target is to sail her, with her original sails, on Opening Day 2000.We see the boat (once finished and sailing) as an ambassador for the class, an exclamation point when we tell people how long 505's last, and a talking point in our efforts to get more people sailing The Boat. I think you don't own a wooden 505, you're just its servant for a time. Like birchbark or cedar-and-canvas canoes (one of which, older than #463 and lovingly restored, also is in our garage) their very existence is a convincing demand that they be kept alive.
We'd be massively grateful for any data from anyone who has (or is familiar with) an original Fairey Marine. Wouldn't you love to see an article in Sailing World or Yachting next spring on the "Flight of the Woodies," if we can get all the surviving early wood 505's (including the wooden Binks boats and others in addition to the Fairey Marines) to sail on the same weekend, all over the country or the world, in celebration of the class nearing its second half-century?
--Dave Eberhardt, US 6570 (ex-861, 2514; current custodian of US 463)